Four broken boys

I'm not dead

I'm not dead.

I feel awfully guilty about this fic. I haven't updated in over a year and I'm really sorry about that and I feel like I owe you guys an explanation about what happened and what I'm going to do.

Bottom line is that my writing is bad. When I first started writing this I was fourteen and I didn't do drafts, I didn't read over the next day, I didn't fill my word count and I was all-round a terrible author. I obviously went back and in recent years I re-wrote most of the first few chapters.

My point is that for the middle of my fic my writing was so bad that I really don't know how to correct it. I've put chapters together in the past and made massive story changes but nothing really helped the fact that the plot was a mess. Back then, I didn't plan everything. I had a short sort of ambition to take the Marauders all the way to their seventh year and a few ideas in between. But nothing was set in stone. So the first twenty or so chapters are a mess. It was filler after filler and the plot didn't move anywhere and frankly it's very boring and exasperating to read. I didn't really know what to do about it and at the time I didn't want to start deleting chapters, so I left it.

The other problem was that I got bored of this fandom. I went from loving the Marauders with every ounce of my being to forcing myself to write a novel length fic about them. So in the time that I was writing this fic I joined two other fandoms, dipped my toe into another two and wrote about five one shots, with quite a few of them unpublished. So you can see how I lost my muse.

I also had some actual problems with my personal life. In the last few chapters I uploaded I talk about my GCSE's (which are exams you take when you leave secondary school) and yes, I had to make time for those. But during that time I dropped a very toxic friend and realised that I had a very toxic family member who I'd been abused by as a kid and teenager, and to top it all off my cat died. It was not a good time for me and I just didn't want to think about this fic.

But I've written chapter 46 for this, and I don't want to leave it. So this is my plan:

I am going to leave this fic here, untouched. I will re-write some of the especially shitty chapters and post all the ones that I want to keep in a separate fic. So if you want updates on when this is going to happen (because this might take a while) then subscribe to this account. I will definitely be making some massive story changes and perhaps take out a few OCs.

Thank you to everyone who commented, left Kudos, subscribed, voted, reviewed on any platform, or even made it this far. I'm really grateful and I hope that you can get around to reading round two.

- HufflepuffleMarauder (Sophie)